Saying democracy without saying democracy

We say, we hear, we read "economic model" and we imagine the monster lurking in the shadows: if we want fair wages, fair prices, and inflation to be eliminated, we must implore the afterlife for the owners of the economic model to change it. If we define the economic model by its effects, it could be expressed as: the economic pattern designed by the masters of capital to get richer and keep getting richer, at any cost and to whomever. Therefore, low wages and rising prices despite people's needs and poverty are the inescapable mandate of the economic model they have imposed on us. And if we add the neoliberal surname to this model, that's it: the monster not only lurks, it devastates entire societies, or at least condemns them to never escape financial prostration.

There is no single model, according to the various explanations, the basic ones: that of supply and demand or that of consumer behavior, with which analysts of economic phenomena can explain (so they believe), with the simplified representation of the whole, the vicissitudes of the phenomenon, and not only: they can, the definitions go, predict the development of complex economic events. We don't understand why they haven't done so, or perhaps in economics the act of predicting is not followed by preventing; it's enough to look at the chain of crises that, when they occur, we learn that specialists had the variables of the current model at hand; if they had made an adequate reading of its development, prior to the crisis in question, they could have avoided financial difficulties that impoverished millions (not just once, but each time), in the perfect opposite sense of the enrichment—there is plenty of evidence—of those at their desks designing, assembling, and putting this model into operation. This image of the masters of capitalism playing with life, or at least with the well-being of humanity, fits well with the simplified explanation, especially during electoral processes, of why we are where we are: some don't want us to progress, and it's a fatality of such magnitude that we have no choice but to adapt.

The movement created by López Obrador championed the idea that another model was possible to lead Mexico out of the long neoliberal night. This is why we should understand that it would take the country in the opposite direction to the fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism: a) the role of the state would become more central. It achieved this: hand in hand with the Armed Forces, nepotism, and bureaucracy, today the Mexican state actively participates in the economy, while at the same time, due to this same central role, it suffers from a serious lack of funds. Therefore, while it manages to collect more, its anti-neoliberal intervention is based on sowing fear, restricting rights and freedoms, and legislating like a diarrhoea, to simulate that the economic and political reality is that of its rhetoric; b) markets would be subject to rules imposed by the State, which it hasn't achieved: the law of supply and demand is in full swing, although we must clarify: it controls, for example, the price of corn, and it's blowing up in its face. It tried this with medicines and only ended in shortages, as with fuels: the government sets the price of lower-octane gasoline and, in parallel, endorses neoliberalism for itself: the rulers and their allies set the model for purchasing and distributing hydrocarbons for their own strict enrichment, using the favorite tool of the long neoliberal night: corruption; c) taking private companies public, which they haven't done yet; instead, they've forced the government into being a businessman, with resounding failures. And to ensure that the economic model of the National Regeneration Movement stops being contradictory and schizophrenic, it has done everything diplomatically and economically possible to preserve the national jewel of neoliberalism, that is, of Salinas's regime: the free trade agreement. The Mexican government doesn't even attempt to whitewash its image by criticizing the United States for ICE's treatment of migrants and their descendants at Uncle Sam's house. However, the supposed new model retains a characteristic similar to any other: the joyful coexistence of the State with organized crime.

But the State is not only the government and its allies in power; citizens are, so the thesis goes, its principal element, the object of its laws and the center of its reason for being. Therefore, they must play the leading role in the economic model corresponding to the feverish imagination of whoever governs (in addition to the very obvious role of taxpayers and those who validate, by show of hands or through popularity polls, the model in which they live their lives), and they do so with determination: if medicines are scarce, if there isn't enough for the basic food basket, if the education and healthcare provided by a government fleeing neoliberal darkness are deficient, and if criminals govern vast territories, the masses end up accepting that it's not easy for the government and, as if it were a family, justify it: there's no money. An understanding with which citizens surrender the only weapon they have to ensure that the economic model, whatever it may be, considers them first: demanding until they are hoarse: don't explain to me why, according to you, the government, you don't have money. Solve our problems right now, it's your obligation, because, besides, there is money. Every time we meekly assimilate the "reasons" of governments for failing, which is their model, we descend a step towards indignity, towards the swamp they want us to be in. A descent in which it's not unusual for us to also hear: no way, that's politics.